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Tuesday, June 28, 2016

ON CONCEPTUALIZING ISLAM AND UN/ISLAMIC

BOOK REVIEW: WHAT IS ISLAM: ON THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING
ISLAMIC , by Shahab Ahmed, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS,2016.

Is violence by ISIS and similar jihadi-salafist groups
Islamic? Is wife -beating Islamic? Is
the killing of homosexuals Islamic? Is subjugation of non-Muslims Islamic? Is the resistance to abolition of slavery Islamic ? (the
list can go on). These and similar kinds of questions (and accompanying ethical
aporias) confront Muslims perhaps more than ever before and have elicited
different and at times symmetrically opposite responses. For the proponents of
the Islamic State and their intellectual sympathizers across the world the
answer to these questions is a clear ‘yes’.
For many other Muslims it is a clear ‘no’(although many would struggle
to justify this view hermeneutically).
How is this possible? Of course, what is or isn’t Islamic depends to a
significant extent upon how Muslims have been not only defining but also conceptualizing
the concept of Islam itself.

Shahab Ahmad’s book under review is a major step
forward in assisting us to coherently conceptualize in descriptive and
analytical terms the full array of complexities involved in Muslims living and
assigning meaning to their Islam and making normative
claims about it in various and often conflicting ways.

The book is divided into three parts (questions,
conceptualizations and re-conceptualizations) and consists of six chapters and
a conclusion.

The aim of the first chapter is to demonstrate that
the only manner in which we can coherently conceptualize the human and historical
phenomenon of Islam is by analytically and conceptually accommodating not only
the diversity of responses of Islam meaning making by Muslims themselves but
their absolute and complete contradiction. Ahmed provides many relevant
examples of this coherent contradiction from a period of time in Islamic
history (approximately 1350-1850 CE) that is the most representative of centrality of this phenomenon, a period
of time in Islamic history which was a major intellectual paradigm for Islam
meaning-making for over half a millennium for both Muslims and non-Muslims
alike. He refers to this historical
epoch as ‘the Balkan to Bengal complex’ which was “the most powerful and
influential social group in Islamic history” (p.80) and included the thought,
conduct, behaviours, values and ideals of
both educated and cultivated Sunnī and
Shīʿī elites ( which were also diffused
among the masses) of that time and geographical space.

Ahmed uses the Balkan to Bengal complex
methodologically also to assess and critically evaluate existing scholarly
writings on the theme of conceptualizing Islam in the second part of the book.
The second, third and fourth chapters are a
tour de force in that regard. Ahmed
in this author’s view convincingly demonstrates
why the existing and most influential conceptual and analytical tool paradigms
premised on the conflation of Islam as Islamic law, the distinction
between Islam and Islamicate ( Hodgson),
Islam as religion and Islam as culture,
Islam as civilization, the binary
between the religion and secular ,sacred and profane, Islam as orthodoxy and
Islam as discursive tradition ( Asad) are all inadequate in conceptualizing the
full gamut of meanings and contradictory normative claims that permeated Islam
as a human and historical phenomenon within this intellectual paradigm.

In the third part of the book Ahmed makes his case for
re-conceptualizing Islam that is conceptually able to coherently capture the entire edifice of the human and historical
phenomenon that is Islam characterized by enormous complexity of meanings,
ambiguity, ambivalence, polyvalence, diffusion, relativism, exploration and
importantly outright internal contradiction in terms of Truth making claims.

The cornerstone of his re-conceptualization is a novel
and in this author’s view brilliant theory of the nature and function of Revelation.
It is beyond the purview of this review to do full justice to it but to
highlight those aspects which are of particular interest to this author. The
point of departure for Ahmed’s reconceptualization
of what is Islam/Islamic is the idea of
the centrality of a hermeneutical engagement
of (the Muslim) Self with Revelation for the process of meaning making
(p.345) where Revelation is its object or source. Ahmed emphasizes how the idea
of a ‘ hermeneutical engagement’ has
important implications for meaning making purposes of the Self by bringing into
focus the questions of source, truth
,agency, self , method, interpretation, understanding and process (p.345).
Importantly, Ahmed underlines the fact that the source-object of meaning of the
hermeneutical engagement is not restricted to scripture alone because “ the act
of Revelation to Muḥammad plus the product of text of Revelation to Muḥammad
does not encompass and is not co- extensive or consubstantial with the full
idea or phenomenon or reality of Revelation to Muḥammad” (p.346). This is so because what he terms Unseen reality or
reality of Revelation (ʿālam al- ghayb) is the source of Revelation from which
the text of Revelation proceeds and is ontologically and alethically prior to
it. It is the Pre-text of Revelation to use Ahmed’s terminology. Importantly, the truth of Revelation is not
only a subset of a larger Truth of Pre-text but is also contingent upon the truth of the Pre-text. While there is no
disagreement among all Muslims concerning this point there is disagreement
about the epistemologies and methodologies of accessing and knowing the Truth
of the Pre-text, namely without a text , via the text or only in the Text. Muslims, past and
present, have made normative hermeneutical claims using all three of these
approaches when conceptualizing their concept of Islam giving rise to a
particular structural relationship between Pre-text and Text. Islamic
philosophers and Sufi, for example, deemphasized the Text in their
hermeneutical engagement with Revelation whereas Islamic jurists emphasized the
Text and theologians where caught in between ( i.e. search Truth about Pre-text
but confine it to the hermeneutical engagement to Text).

Conceptualizing Islam as hermeneutical engagement of
the Self with revelation as both Pre-text and Text is, however, incomplete
unless one adds an additional element, namely what Ahmed terms Con-text. It is
defined as a ‘body of meaning’, ‘an entire vocabulary’ of meanings of
Revelation engendered over the course of Islamic history. In other words, it is
a product of historical outcome of the hermeneutical engagement with Revelation
at any point it time (p.356). Con-text includes “epistemologies,
interpretations, identities, persons and places, structures of authority,
textualities and intertexualities, motifs, symbols, values, meaningful
questions and meaningful answers, agreements and disagreements, emotions and
affinities and affects, aesthetics, modes of saying, doing and being, and other
truth- claims and components of existential exploration and meaning- making in
terms of Islam that Muslims acting as Muslims have produced, and to which
Muslims acting as Muslims have attached themselves during the process of
hermeneutical engagement with Revelation”(p.357). As such Con-Text is not
restricted to texts or textual discourse alone as it includes practices, both
individual and collective, that have meaning in terms of Islam to those who
engage in them ( e.g. prayer, fasting etc.). Importantly, the contents of Con-Text are not somehow to
be viewed as extraneous to Islam but can be genealogically traced back to a
particular Pre-text- Text
structural dynamic. Moreover,
both hermeneutical engagement with Pre-text and Text is only possible from a
vantage-point of a particular Con-text (at any point in time and place) which
is by default constitutive of them. It
is a ‘built environment of meaning’ (p.357) in which an individual
meaning-making person is embedded. Finally, Ahmed distinguishes between
Con-text in toto and Con-text in loco. This distinction is premised on the idea
that not all Con-text is actively present
in a particular context ( in sense of
space and time). That which is actively present is called Con-text in loco
(p.361) and inactive element although potentially present and available is Con-text in toto .

Ahmed’s theory of revelation includes additional
elements such as multidimensionality, hierarchy, exteriority-interiority, the
distinction between the private and the public dimensions of Revelation,
ambiguity and ambivalence etc. which due to space contains I am unable to
comment on at any length.

In what follows I would like to return to the
questions I raised at the very start in
the light of Ahmed’s reconceptualization of the concept of Islam
and some of the work I did previously on making sense of how two contemporary
communities of interpretation ( in the sense of theorized and employed by Stanley
Fish ) I term neo-traditional Salafis
and progressive Muslims make normative but outright contradictory claims about
what it means to be a religiously ideal ‘Believer’ and ‘Woman’ in Islam
(Duderija 2011)on the basis of their respective methods of interpretation
(manahij) .

While it is true that Ahmed’s book does not aim to
provide a prescriptive answer to questions of normative Islam in the name of
Islamic ‘orthodoxy’, it nevertheless successfully analyses and brings into
focus the idea of accommodating the competing
normative claims surrounding the
question what is Islamic (or more precisely qualifies to be termed ‘Islamic’) as
being constitutive of conceptualizing Islam as a human and historical
phenomenon adequately.

Ahmed clearly states that one can meaningfully speak of Islamic violence (as one can of American or
Israeli violence) as an outcome of a hermeneutical engagement of Self with the
Pre-text, Text and Con-text of Revelation not in a sense that Islam causes such
violence but that “that the violence is made meaningful by the actor in terms
of Islam”. Although Ahmed makes note that Muslims would disagree whether this
violence is indeed legitimate (i.e. coherent with its source), a question that
Ahmed (and many others who engaged the
question of is ISIS ‘Islamic’ ) does not pose is whether the kind of violence
perpetrated by jihadist -salafi groups like ISIS is hermeneutically reasonable given the textual discourses present in the Context in toto on this
question. I emphasize the textual
discourses element of the Con-text in toto since it is evident that the
salafi-jihadist groups hermeneutical engagement with Revelation is very much restricted to the Text in
relation to not just the question of violence but also other questions I
outlined above. The same can be said about the pre-modern juristic discourses
which reached their hermeneutical
stability in the late fifth or early sixth century hijri (Duderija,2011). Importantly, as noted by Ahmed, in the modern
period ( for various reasons such as the rise of the nation state ) in
particular there has been a shift in reorienting historical consciousness of
Muslims with respect to their hermeneutic engagement with Revelation in which
Islam meaning making in terms of Pre-text only has become unrecognizable. On
top of this, a significant depletion of the Con-text also took place (p.515-516)
resulting in dominance of Text based hermeneutical engagement with Revelation .
Ahmed terms this phenomenon aptly the Downsizing of Revelation from that of
pre-Text, Text and Con-text to Text only or Text read in a highly depleted
Con-text.

In other words
what we are witnessing is a further increase of hermeneutical affinity between
jihadist Salafist approach to Revelation and how Islamic law is conceptualized
and applied today by those who have a Text oriented hermeneutical engagement with
Revelation for the purposes of conceptualizing Islamic law. This increase in
hermeneutical affinity operates in the context of an existing hermeneutical
affinity between pre-modern Text oriented juristic discourse and that pre-modern
salafi -jihadist approaches ( on pre-modern see Mourad and Lindsay,2013 with
reference to jihad and Adang, Schmidke,
Ansari and Fierro,2015 with reference to takfir) .

Drawing upon my previous work (Duderija, 2011) I want
to do now is to identify levels or points of hermeneutical affinity between
(pre)-modern Text oriented hermeneutical engagement with Revelation of the jurists and that of salafi-jihadist ( I
will refer to them collectively as ‘traditional’) and the kind of implications this has in terms
of describing the actions of ISIS as
Islamic or not.

The first one is at the level of the nature of language and the nature of revelation. Traditional approaches to interpreting the Qur’an are
heavily philological, with interpretations largely restricted to observable
linguistic features of the Qur’an text. According to this methodology, readers
retrieve the text’s meaning through analysis of the Arabic grammar, syntax, and
morphology. At the same time, the Qur’an text is considered as the verbatim
Word of God essentially different from human language. Moreover, its meaning is
completely independent of the psychological make-up of the Prophet Muhammad and
his prophetic experience. Qur’anic language is thus considered to be operating
outside of history and possessed of a fixed meaning that is, in principle, not dependent on human
modes of perception and analysis.

The second level is in terms
of location and breath of meaning. Traditional approaches largely consider that
readers can perceive authorial intent and recover some objective meaning of the
text. Since the meaning of the text is fixed, the role of the reader in determining
or influencing meaning is minimal. Belief in the objective existence of
meaning in the mind of the author, which is readily accessible in a
similarly objective fashion to the reader, contributes to the idea that there
is only one correct interpretation of the text.

The third level concerns the relationship between text and context. Because of the affinities at the first level outline above philological hermeneutics tends to
marginalize the historical context in which the Qur’an text was
revealed. Although there is recognition of the historical character and
development of the Qur’an when speaking of “occasions of revelation” (asbab
al-nuzul) and “abrogation” (naskh), there are no clear hermeneutical
models for fully integrating and utilizing these aspects in interpreting the
language of the Qur’an. To the extent that historical context is considered,
traditional philologists do not systematically distinguish between historical
and ahistorical dimensions of meaning to the text. As a result, there is a strong
tendency to universalize what, from a contextualist perspective, would be a historically
particular meaning.

The fourth level is with
respect to textual coherence. Both exegetical approaches downplay the essentially
oral and kerygmatic nature of the revelation and mainly take a word-by-word
segmental and sequential analysis of the canonical text. Thus this approach
fails, among others, to fully appreciate the Qur’an’s thematic coherence and
has a tendency to interpret the general in terms of particular instead of other
way around. It also renders didactic and ethical elements of Revelation under
the purview of the legal.

The fifth level is about the
role of reason in ethico-legal interpretations of the Qur’an. Traditional
exegetes heavily restrict the role of reason to its analogical form, so that
all ethico-legal interpretations must be linked to textual evidence. If there
is no directly pertinent text, then every effort is made to identify an
indirectly pertinent text with a common underlying principle and to interpret
it in light of its significance to the new case. The underlying
assumptions are that ethico-legal knowledge must always derive from
revelation and that humans cannot know what is ethically or legally right by
independent reason. As such any discussion of underlying values and objectives
of revelation can be only identified on the basis of a text based hermeneutic
and their conceptualization as well as application is not to be extended beyond
it.

At the sixth level the
affinity is with respect to identifying universal vs contextually /historically
contingent elements of revelation. As a result of the above
five (and the one below) both approaches for example consider the various hadd punishments,
the institution of slavery, polygamy, forms of divorce ( e.g talaq) and gender
roles and norms mentioned in the Qur’an to be in principle beyond negotiation,
universal and immutable aspects of revelation.

The finally seventh level is regarding the nature and the conception of the Prophetic Sunna.
For traditional approaches, recourse to
the sunnah as an exegetical device is necessarily constitutive
of, and constrained by, the textual corpus of Hadith. One noteworthy
implication of this textual conception of sunnah is that
interpretive reasoning, while to some extent important in selecting and evaluating
individual hadith reports, is not constitutive of the concept
of sunna itself as an exegetical device. When coupled with the above
outlined hermeneutical tendencies (especially levels three and five) it renders
the concept of sunna dependent on that of ‘sahih’ hadith.

So given the above, my
contention is that because of these hermeneutical affinities between (pre-) modern
conceptualizations of Islam ( or Islamic law in particular) the interpretations
of scholars affiliated with ISIS on a range of issues including burning of gays, subjugation of non-Muslims, wife beating and use civilian non-combatants as human shield
to name but a few ought to be conceptualized
as ‘Islamic’ from the perspective of
those who subscribe to (pre)modern conceptualization of Islamic law centered on
a Text based approach to a hermeneutical engagement with the Revelation whose delineating
features were outlined above ( if they are to remain true to their hermeneutical
approach and keep their hermeneutical
integrity ).

Consequently, for approaches
to Islamic law of the (pre)-modern jurist to be rendered hermeneutically unreasonable vis a vis those
of the jihadist -salafis would require some fundamental shifting of the
hermeneutical tendencies identified
above as embodied by progressive interpretational approaches. From a perspective
of a progressive or modernist approach to Revelation which is based on a
markedly different approach to the seven hermeneutically delineating features
outlined above ( see Duderija 2011) the same practices identified above are rendered hermeneutically unreasonable and
hence are rightfully considered as unislamic.

Suleiman A. Mourad and James E. Lindsay (2013), The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period: Ibn ʿAsākir of Damascus: The Forty Hadiths for Inciting Jihad, Leiden:Brill.

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About Me

Adis Duderija is currently a Visiting Senior Lecturer at the University Malaya, Gender Studies. He received his Ph. D in 2010 from the University of Western Australia. He is the author of Constructing Religiously Ideal ‘Believer’ and ‘Muslim Woman’ Concepts: Neo-Traditional Salafi and Progressive Muslim Methods of Interpretation (Manahij), Palgrave, 2011. His other publications can be found on the tabs above.